Man Hospitalized With Severe Lung Infection After Sniffing His Own Smelly Socks

There's a lot of human body parts that have the potential to pong. While most of us practice good enough personal hygiene to avoid having strangers recoil in horror when we pass them in public, there are some areas that inevitably smell from time to time.

Armpits are arguably the most common culprits. It doesn't matter if you've showered and put on antiperspirant that morning, if it's a warm enough day, you could end up sweating buckets and smelling like a gym without air conditioning.

Another common culprit, but one which is arguably less noticeable, are feet. To be honest, I actually have a phobia of them after I had to put a slipper on a gangrenous foot when I worked as a carer. The smell stuck to my hand for weeks.

But while unpleasant smells aren't exactly fun to deal with, when we think of them and the sickness they inspire, we never actually imagine ending up in the emergency ward just because we've had an encounter with a tandoori pit or a cheesy foot.

Unbelievably, however, this did indeed happen to one man in China who was rushed to A&E after smelling his dirty socks.

The unnamed man was subsequently hospitalized when doctors diagnosed him with a lung infection, which developed after he repeatedly smelled his socks after a long day at work. Perhaps he was getting high from the fumes. Who knows?

The bizarre habit led to the man from Zhangzhou, in South-eastern China's Fujian province, sniffing one sock too many - namely, a sock containing a fungus which had grown from sweat inside his footwear. When he breathed in its spores, it spread to his lungs.

After being admitted to the hospital, doctors diagnosed him with a severe lung infection and had to keep him in for treatment.

Doctors reportedly confirmed that the man's sock smelling habit was to blame for the infection.

But this man is not the first person to recently hit the headlines because of unbelievable damage to his lungs. Earlier this month, news emerged that a 36-year-old man died after he tragically coughed up part of his lung.

The case, which was published in the New England Journal of Medicine, revealed that the man had been admitted to the hospital while suffering from heart failure and died while receiving treatment less than a week later.

To discover how he coughed up part of his lung, check out the video below:

NEJM reported that he had a pacemaker because he had a poor history of cardiovascular health.

The unnamed patient was being treated at the University of California San Francisco Medical Centre when he began to cough violently. Things eventually got so bad that he coughed up a bronchial tree, pictured below.

This is a series of tubes that distribute air from the windpipes to the lungs.

According to reports, he had a rare ejection fraction deficiency (this relates to how much blood is pumped around the body with each contraction). As a result, the organ was operating at half of its normal capacity.

"His medical history included heart failure with an ejection fraction of 20 percent, bioprosthetic aortic-valve replacement for bicuspid aortic stenosis, endovascular stenting of an aortic aneurysm, and placement of a permanent pacemaker for complete heart block," the NEJM report says.

After the man coughed up the bronchial tree, he was intubated and a bronchoscopy was performed. He later died from heart failure complications ('volume overload and poor cardiac output'), even though he had a ventricular assist device.